THE RIDDLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Nowadays, neuroscientists debate how immaterial consciousness arises from a material brain. But how can we ever find an answer this way, when the question and its possible answers form a seamless circle – a self-negating, insoluble conundrum? Consciousness is trying to solve the riddle of its own existence by analysing its own sensory perceptions. It is trying to understand its own nature by examining its material experience. How can consciousness understand itself in terms of its own external and peripheral experiences?
The better question to ask is how the material brain and all that it perceives in the realm of the material senses arise from an immaterial consciousness. For without consciousness, there are no material perceptions, there is no material experience.
The brain consists of water, minerals and organic substances, of atoms and molecules. And from the brain, so they say, arises consciousness. But how can consciousness arise from atoms and molecules when atoms and molecules are perceptions of consciousness?
Most scientists (though not all) reason that mind and consciousness arise from neurological activity in the brain. But maybe it is the other way around. Maybe neurological brain activity arises from the presence of mind and consciousness.
In order for us to function in this world, the mind must affect the body, and the body the mind. This means that all mental, emotional and spiritual processes and experiences – including meditation, out-of-the-body, and mystical experiences – will show up as neurological activity in the brain. But that does not mean that brain activity is the cause of mental processes and consciousness. That is why no amount of knowledge of the relationship between brain function and states of consciousness, including mental and emotional processes, will ever lead to an understanding of the nature and origins of consciousness. It won’t help you to understand yourself. Even the science of psychology, the analysis of the functioning of the subconscious, has little basis in neuroscience.
No conceptual answer concocted by the mind regarding either itself or that of the underlying consciousness that gives it existence can ever contain the whole story. How could it? How can the knees understand the entire body? How can a part understand the whole?
The way for consciousness to understand the nature of consciousness is beyond the reasoning or intellectual faculty of the mind. Consciousness or being can only understand itself by a process of inward focus or concentration upon itself. By a process of inward expansion, of inward ascent in consciousness towards the source of consciousness – the One Being. By a different way of knowing and understanding.
This is nothing new to us. We are already aware that there are ways of knowing other than intellectual thought. How is it, for example, that we experience and appreciate beauty? How do we feel love and affection? Or how do we even know that we are conscious? Not by intellect or reason. The philosopher who said, “I think, therefore I am,” got it wrong. The reality is, “I am, therefore I think.”
Consciousness comes first. You need consciousness even to convince yourself that immaterial consciousness has no existence independent of material substance.
The One Being can also be called the Universal Consciousness. Our individual consciousness can only understand itself by experiencing oneness with its Source, with the Universal Consciousness, and therein lies the answer to the riddle of consciousness. Hence, the sages of ancient Greece said, “Know thyself.”
This is no new idea. This way of knowing has been described by practically all the world’s spiritual traditions. It is called mystic or spiritual experience. And it’s not just Eastern traditions that are familiar with the experience. The ancient Greeks, and many of the early Christians knew of it, too. They called it gnosis.
Once it is understood that the primary reality is being or consciousness, then everything starts to fall into place. A scenario based on the idea that matter and material energy are the primary reality will always be faced with the two questions, “But where did it all come from?” and “Who is asking the questions?” The realization that everything is an expression of consciousness removes this sting from the tail. It takes us out of the realm of paradox and duality into the realm of being where everything is as it is, outside the illusion of time. Then we come to understand that ultimate ‘answers’ are to be found through the personal exploration of one’s own consciousness, not through intellectual analysis.
And this is the nature and purpose of meditation or spiritual practice. Transcending intellect, meditation is the exploration of consciousness by consciousness itself. It doesn’t supplant or invalidate scientific study. It simply places it in a wider framework. The framework of the One Being.